Every time I think about setting down to write this, I can never figure out how to start. I can think of specific little bits I want to make sure I include and how I want to thoughtfully word things, but beginning it is hard.
This seems to be a theme in my life: beginning is hard. I much prefer to wake up and find myself in the middle of procrastinated chaos and make incredible magic in the moment. I am an Aquarius after all. Always carefully planning for beginnings that I will avoid until I realise they already happened two days ago.
The truth is, this news I have is not really new. It has been creeping into my being, my mind, my dreams, and conversations for over a decade. So, you could say I have been procrastinating, avoiding beginning, for over a decade. I will not fight you about that.
Mind you, this is not exactly the path I carefully planned in notebooks from the bunk bed of my childhood bedroom oh so many years ago, but similar. In fact, I have not deviated too far, ultimately, from those days of daydreaming and of fanciful escape.
Author John Green says, "imaging the future is a kind of nostalgia." It can become a trap, keeping you from ever beginning. There is a comfort in consistency, in planning, thinking, and weighing relative risks verses absolute risks and benefits.
For so many years I have been a healer for my community. I have healed illnesses, bodies, wounds, hearts, and minds. Always stretching myself, always learning more skills to help in more ways. And with an ever growing number who call me first, before any other provider.
Like beginnings, finding a new care provider is hard. So, when you find one you like and trust, that knows you, and who knows how to hold space just right for you, you do not want to ever let them go.
But even your beloved first, your primary care provider, must at times, wisely reach out to other providers with more knowledge and access and then lovingly refer you over to the ones they trust.
Over the years those first calls have become more and more complex, requiring me to consult and refer more and more. It is usually not the lack of knowledge, but the lack of access. I have acquired as much access (and then some, ahem) as I possibly can. My community wants and needs me to have more access.
For the second time in my life there is a calling and I am answering it. It has been there for years and I have procrastinated as long as possible. It is time to stop planning and to act, to begin.
Moving forward, I will be taking a sabbatical from on-call midwifery. An educational sabbatical. I am (finally) going to medical school.* I am on the path to becoming your Family Practice Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine.
I will still be providing well care, herbalist consults, free clinic midwifery care, and of course assisting my dear associate midwives with breech and twin births. I will not be accepting any more primary homebirth clients of my own until I have completed this beginning.
On the other side of this adventure, when I get those calls from my community, I will have the access and additional knowledge required to provide advanced continuity of care and really be the Primary Care Provider that you already think of and refer to me as. I will be able to care for whole families; birth, breath, and death; through all types of transitions đłď¸âđ, and I can not wait to be able to hold greater space for you.
I hope you will help me make some incredible magic out of the chaos these next few years shall bring. I am going to need my community as much as it has needed me.
*specific details to come
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